Met Home of the Month: A tricky lakeside lot and a midwestern family's desire for a modern country getaway became an adventure in design for Min/Day architects

Paul and Annette Smith have gotten used to seeing tour boats pass their country place, which faces a large lake in northern Iowa, near the Minnesota border. As the boats glide by, "we'll hear the guide talking about the house," says Paul. The Smiths aren't entirely surprised by the attention. Their home stands out as one of the few modernist structures on West Okoboji Lake. But while boaters may get to enjoy its rich exterior, they're missing out on the complexity inside.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The layout could have been simple, but then it wouldn't have served the needs of the Smiths and their three sons, Louis, Charlie and Greg, who range from high-school to college age. The family chose a lake within easy driving distance of their home in Omaha, Nebraska (about 150 miles away), but that meant sacrificing seclusion. Indeed, the parcel they bought has only 40 feet of street frontage, and neighbors' cottages crowd its lot lines.

Architects Min/Day (the partnership of Jeffrey L. Day, whose office is in Omaha, and E.B. Min, who works in San Francisco) came up with a layout that lets some rooms point directly toward the water, while others open onto private outdoor spaces. They also chose a variety of surfaces (opaque, translucent and transparent), for revealing some parts of the setting and obscuring others. The architects' efforts paid off. Says Paul: "You feel like you're really at the lake, not just in a house at the lake."

Paul Smith, who runs an energy investment fund, is an engineer by training; Annette has an undergraduate degree in architecture. Determined to find designers who were adventurous but easy to work with, they did something few residential clients try: they held a competition, inviting three architecture firms to devote a week to developing ideas for the new house (each firm was paid for its time). Of the three, Min/Day made the most exciting presentation, Annette remembers.

Early in the process, the Smiths asked the architects to try to save the old oak trees dotting the property. The solution was to make the foundation smaller than the house itself (minimizing damage to the tree roots) and to cantilever rooms off the foundation (right). The cantilevers proved to benefit more than the trees: they also make the rooms feel as though they're on the water.

Inside, the architects, who also served as interior designers, stayed away from what Min calls "conventionally nice" materials—granite, marble, plaster—and instead used plywood, concrete, rubber and even industrial metal grates. The goal, Day says, was to see how "background materials" could be detailed in elegant ways. Once they had established crisp geometries, they did everything they could to keep surfaces pristine. The Smiths accepted nearly all of their suggestions.

If the public rooms of the house are mostly neutral in tone, the private spaces are anything but. When it came to the bathrooms, with their small windows, the architects decided to use color throughout to heighten the feeling of enclosure. (By contrast, Min explains, using colors on just a few individual surfaces tends to fragment spaces.)

In each bathroom, the main components are paint (from Benjamin Moore), laminate (by Italy's Abet Laminati) for the vanity fronts and resin (from 3-Form) for countertops. None of the colors is custom (if you look really closely at the bathrooms, you'll see that the colors don't match perfectly, Min says). Still, no detail was too small for the architects' attention. Control joints—slits in the concrete meant to prevent cracking (see "What the Pros Know")—were lined up with the edges of cabinets and windows. Min says she and Day produced a special set of drawings just for the control joints. And the architects specified 3/16-inch reveals where the gypsum-board wall meets the ceiling and floor. To create the reveals, the contractor trims the wallboard with plastic or metal channels called J beads.

"The kind we used has a tear-away piece that keeps the reveal free of joint compound and dust," says Day. "The strip is pulled off when the wall is ready to paint." The point of the reveals, he explains, is to "create a visual crispness in the room" by ensuring that every surface has a clear outline.

The house in the woods gave the architects the opportunity to explore wood in myriad forms. Outside the master bedroom (above), vertical slats help direct the eye toward the lake, while giving Paul and Annette a bit of extra privacy. The architects, who also served as the landscape designers, say that building the house resulted in the loss of only two bur oak trees.

Inside, Min/Day created nearly all of the bedroom furniture from one of their favorite materials: slices of Baltic birch plywood, glued together in stacks. That includes the headboard, which forms the back of a custom cabinet unit, supported on metal legs. But in perhaps their boldest exploration of the possibilities of wood, Min and Day designed a water droplet pattern for the headboard (an obvious reference to the lake) and then had it carved out by a computer-controlled router, which is able to execute complex patterns in three dimensions, following digital instructions.

For all their attention to the possibilities that wood presents, the architects originally wanted to clad the house in Cor-Ten steel, which has a deep rust color. But the steel supplier couldn't meet the deadline. "It was a nightmare," Min says. So, rather than delay construction, they decided to switch to 1-by-2-inch ipê slats, arranged vertically and installed as a rain screen (which means they are separated, by about half an inch, from the waterproofing that seals the house). Giving up on steel was "disappointing after all the work we put in," says Min, "but I think the house looks great in wood."

What The Pros Know

The bathrooms' concrete floors required control joints, so named because they control cracking. (Even so, cracks are a natural part of the concrete curing process and can never be entirely prevented.) The so-called joints are simply slits, about an eighth of an inch wide and half an inch deep, cut into the slabs with a circular saw before the concrete fully hardens. By contrast, expansion joints are designed to prevent "seismic shifts" when concrete expands in warm weather. Expansion joints have to go all the way through the slabs, but in air-conditioned spaces, they can be far apart; in this project, the architects were able to position them under the walls. But control joints have to be relatively close together. The rule of thumb, explains Jeff Day, is that the space between control joints should be about 24 times the thickness of the slab, or 72 inches in this case. Control joints can be filled with sealant, but Min/Day left them empty. Any dust that collects comes out when the floor is vacuumed.